Margaret Drabble has said that she will not write another novel because she is worried about repeating herself.

The 69-year-old author of novels including A Summer Birdcage and The Ice Age told the Radio 4 arts programme Front Row last week that she had stopped writing fiction. "What I don't like is the idea that I'm repeating myself without knowing it, which is what old people do endlessly. The numbers of times I've heard people tell the same stories - the numbers of times I've told the same stories - and you don't really want to start doing that in novels, when somebody can say hmm, you wrote that in 1972," she said.

Drabble, who was made a dame of the British empire last year, went on to relate an incident from her latest book, The Pattern in the Carpet - part-memoir, part jigsaw history - in which she tells a story about her aunt finding a horse's head in a rubbish dump and feeding bits of it to her dog. She couldn't, she said, remember if she had used the scenario in a novel before, and felt that meant it was time to stop. "The fact that I can't remember whether I've used it or not means the barrier, the line between writing and remembering and thinking, is more blurred for me than it used to be," she said.

Drabble said she had told her publisher that she wouldn't be writing any more fiction, "but they don't believe me". Her literary agent, Jim Gill at United Agents, said today that the comments were "based on how she feels at the minute". "Of course she would reserve the option to change her mind and write a novel if she felt like it," he said. Drabble's most recent novel, The Sea Lady, was published in 2006. She has also won acclaim as a biographer and critic.

Last week Gabriel García Márquez refuted rumours that he had put down his pen for good, saying that "not only is it not true [that I won't return to writing], but the only thing I do is write".